


dragons, north and south

by besselfcn



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Childhood Sexual Abuse, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Gang Rape, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, M/M, Parent/Child Incest, Sibling Incest, Suicidal Thoughts, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-05
Updated: 2018-11-05
Packaged: 2019-08-18 20:35:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,364
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16524182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/besselfcn/pseuds/besselfcn
Summary: He doesn’t know why he still tries to teach Genji. How to act, how to endure, how to survive. His brother is stubborn before he is anything else, and telling him to lie back and submit the way Hanzo has learned to is less than fruitless. It’s insulting.But he still thinks of him, as often as he allows himself.





	dragons, north and south

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sciencefictioness](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sciencefictioness/gifts).



> This fic is absolutely deadest dove, don'test eat. There are no explicit sexual scenes, but the entire fic rotates around the idea of the brothers' sexual abuse at the hands of their father, so please do know that going in.

“That settles it, then,” Sojiro says, and Hanzo makes every effort to pull himself back down into the present--back to the clan meeting, to his hands clasped in his lap, his feet going numb under his folded legs. “We won’t be interfering with Vishkar’s petty affairs. The clan has larger issues to worry about. Dismissed.”

Hanzo nods along with the rest of the elders; they press their hands to the sides and stand gracefully, a swift and practiced motion. Hanzo holds his breath and moves with them.

“Hanzo.”

His fingers curl and falter across the ground.

Sojiro turns his head to the side. “Stay.”

 ---

As far as Hanzo can remember, it’s always been like this.

He knows there must have been some first time, some watershed moment that marked the beginning of this rotten aspect of his life. But that night, along with countless others, are blotted out of his memory--covered in some thick fog that bars him from seeing whatever is behind it. His childhood, even though just barely behind him, feels erased. Left with tattered fragments.

There are the feelings of it all, though, that try to burrow their way through. Shame. Disgust. Fear, cloying and dark inside his throat. Whether it should be his shame or his father’s shame or the entire damned clan’s, he’s never been able to know.

That, too, lies behind fog.

\---

The dragons hate this. He can tell by the way they roar--just under his flesh, burning almost too hot to bear. But he doesn’t mind that; it gives him a center. A focal point, other than the one Sojiro presses upon insistently.

Maybe Hanzo hated it once, himself. Maybe he used to fight back against it, with claws and teeth and guttural roars, the way the dragons do when he falls asleep. Maybe that’s where he went wrong--when he stopped fighting.

But what had he ever gotten for it? Fewer restless nights? A modicum of hesitation, of restraint?

No. Not that he ever recalls. Just a closed fist around his neck. Sojiro’s own dragons, snapping at the throats of his, until they shrunk back with a pain that rattled him to his bones and something deeper.

So the dragons are angry, this way--when he lies there and takes it and reacts only when and how he is told. But they’re hidden. They’re safer. He can’t ruin them, too.

Get up, he hears, from somewhere far away, and he begins the process of finding his way back to his body, wherever it is that he left it.

I said, and there’s a _slap_ , a ringing against his body’s cheek, “get _up_. You’re finished here. Go clean yourself up and make yourself useful somewhere else.”

Sojiro walks away, bare feet silent across the wooden mats of the floor.

Shakily, with one hand drawn across his mouth, Hanzo rises from his knees.

His legs still feel numb as he walks, though no longer with pins and needles--just a dull detachment, as if these are not his legs but someone else’s, and he is only borrowing them. The feeling is not unfamiliar, but always unsettling. Annoying. He needs to force the feeling back.

When he arrives at his room he heads straight for the washroom. He doesn’t feel like vomiting, this time; instead he brushes his teeth in the sink until he tastes blood. Rinses once with the mouthwash that burns his tongue; spits. Rinses a second time; swallows it down, lets it coat the inside of his esophagus and into his stomach.

He takes his swords from the wall where they hang and slings them over his shoulder, sheaths and all.

And he walks.

\---

“Brother.”

Hanzo takes another swing at the training dummy. Sparks shatter off its chassis where the metal edge of the sword cuts in deep and it tips to one side; then it rights itself again, and he swings hard the other way, slicing into the circuitry of the robot itself.

“ _Hanzo_.”

He turns to the next dummy and swings, hard--the sword cleaves through like butter, turns it to scrap metal. He can feel his legs burning now, leans hard into the feeling; pushes away the voice and the footsteps approaching behind him.

Turn, and strike, and turn, and--

“Hanzo.”

Genji.

He stands in front of the next target, hands raised--no weapons, no armor. Just him, a hand held out. Hanzo’s arms shake as he lowers the blade.

“What do you want,” he asks, and sheathes the sword against his back. He turns to the scrap metal on the ground and begins collecting it in his hands.

“Nothing,” Genji says, and when Hanzo only sighs, “just to see you.”

“Here I am.”

“Hanzo, please."

He dumps the scrap metal in the bin to the side of the training grounds and walks, a brisk pace that anyone but Genji might have some trouble keeping. But his brother bounces along at his side as if on springs, nearly running backwards as he speaks.

“You’re _hurt_ ,” Genji says. “I can see it, you know. I always can.”

Hanzo shakes his head. “I am fine.”

Genji’s eyes flit up and down his face; he hops, light on his feet. Little Sparrow, indeed. “I saw you leaving his room.”

His fists clench; his jaw aches. “There was a meeting.”

“You know that’s not what I mean.”

“Then what _do_ you mean, Genji?” he says, and he surprises them both as he draws up short, stops and puts a hand against Genji’s chest, pushes him against the walls of Hanamura. “Hmm? Do you want me to say it? Are _you_ going to say it? Out here, in front of all our ancestors? What do you mean?”

He can feel the birdlike fluttering of his brother’s heart, the stuttered breathing--can feel the rock in his own throat, burning, burning, begging for something to wash it down--sake, rice wine, anything he can get his hands on--and he cannot will not look at Genji--

“I’m sorry,” Genji says, and Hanzo lets his hand fall to his side. “Brother. I’m sorry.”

Hanzo forces his legs to move. His legs. One. Two. Leaden, heavy steps.

“Just--” Genji calls, and he stops. “Just tell me. Is he angry?”

Hanzo breathes out. “No,” he says, and then, “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

\---

He isn’t angry. Hanzo sleeps.

\---

And then, “Anija,” Genji cries, three days later--three nights, the clock says it’s only two in the morning--and he’s standing over Hanzo with his clothes all torn, and he pulls at the sheets of Hanzo’s bed like a child, pushes frantically at his shoulders, “Anija, please, _please_ , let me, I need--”

And Hanzo thinks _no,_ he thinks, _go back to bed_ , he thinks _you and I are not children anymore, we have not been for so long, don’t make me do this to you,_  but when he opens his mouth all that he hears is, “Come here, come here, I’ve got you.”

He moves over and Genji climbs into bed with him, curls a leg around Hanzo’s body and presses his nose into his shoulder.

It’s wet, and for a moment he thinks it’s snot and tears, but then he smells acrid copper.

“Genji,” Hanzo says. He pulls back, feels in the dark along the ridges of his brother’s bones; he feels him inhale sharply wherever he grazes bruised skin, almost can make out the swelling of his eyes in the dark. “Genji, _why_.”

“Please,” Genji begs, for nothing.

“He’s going to kill you one day,” Hanzo says, and the truth of it tastes like poison on his tongue. He sees blue sparks at the edges of his vision as he wipes the blood from his brother’s nose. “Genji, do you understand me?”

“I need you,” Genji says, and Hanzo doesn’t know whether he’s even listened or not. “ _Please,_  just--make me forget about him.”

Hanzo’s heart cracks, then, along familiar fault lines.

“Okay,” he says, and he presses shaking lips to his brother’s wounds. “Okay. I have you.”

\---

He doesn’t know when all that started, either. When it moved beyond something they could justify and into--whatever it is now. Desperation. Longing. Some sickness that eats at their blood, his the same as his father’s.

 _This_ shame, at least, he is sure belongs to him.

\---

He doesn’t know why he still tries to teach Genji. How to act, how to endure, how to survive. His brother is stubborn before he is anything else, and telling him to lie back and submit the way Hanzo has learned to is less than fruitless. It’s insulting.

But he still thinks of him, as often as he allows himself.

He thinks of Genji’s neck with bite marks on it. He thinks of his body all shattered. He thinks of the soul that rests somewhere deep inside his brother’s chest--a fiery green ember that burns, and burns, and he wonders how often his father tries to snuff it out and fails--he wonders if anyone will ever succeed--he wonders if that would be the last thing left of Genji, if he were left broken and dying on the ground.

He thinks of Genji at night, when his father slips into his room, when he closes his eyes and wonders at the energy it must take to fight something like this.

He thinks of Genji when his dragons stir below his skin, desperate to be let free, and he goes into the woods and nocks arrow after arrow as he lets them ravage through the undergrowth.

He thinks of Genji in the bath, when he thinks of slipping beneath the water and leaving his father what he wants, some willing and empty shell, and he sinks himself in past his ears before he hears Genji begging _don’t leave me alone with him, please_ and he surfaces again, chest burning.

He wants more than quiet, stolen nights lapping away the blood and sweat left on his brother’s skin. He wants impossible things. He wants horrible things.

He doesn’t remember how to want anything else.

\---

Then comes the day when he passes Sojiro in the halls and sees the stark white bandage wrapped around his hand. A few steps behind is Genji--the right side of his face bruised a deep purple, neck still a bright and angry red.

Hanzo glances down at their father’s hand; back up to Genji’s battered face.

Genji smiles.

Then he winks.

Hanzo’s heart seizes.

\---

Hanamura is quiet for two long weeks.

\---

It’s mid-day--and maybe that’s the worst of it, looking back, that the sun is out, that the sky is clear and blue and the castle is warm, all its windows open, like some soft painting of a perfect springtime--and Hanzo hears a frantic pounding at his door.

“Hanzo,” calls Genji’s voice, and he _knows_ , with sickening clarity, that something has gone terribly wrong.

He wrenches the door open and Genji nearly collapses in his arms--tumbles through the door frame, gasping for air. Hanzo pulls the door shut behind him and--

“Oh, Genji,” he breathes. “How did this happen?”

Because this is not the work of their father--not alone. It can’t be. Genji looks _ravaged_ : clothes in shreds, bruises lining his hips and thighs, blood smeared across his face and down his legs and hair nearly pulled out in _chunks_ \-- it makes Hanzo feel sick, just looking at him, and he doesn’t know and doesn’t want to know what else there might be but he has to, or else Genji just suffers that alone and he can’t.

Genji stumbles forward, collapses onto his knees on the mat by Hanzo’s bed. Hanzo kneels; the dragons roar and scratch at his skin, heating the tips of his fingers as he runs them along Genji’s arms.

“Y _ou like to put up a fight,_ ” Genji mocks, and Hanzo recognizes the cadence of their father’s voice so clearly that it nearly chokes him. “ _Show them, then. Fight all you want and see where it gets you, Sparrow._ ”

Hanzo sees white, and then electric blue.

He feels the dragons boiling up through his skin, feels the crackling of the air around him--and he only reins them back because he sees Genji, the way he flinches, the tension that holds his body like a spring, and he forces it down, down, down.

“Who did this,” he demands, an echo outside of himself. “Tell me, Genji. I’ll slit their throats--just give me the names, I swear.”

“I don’t know,” Geni whispers.

“Genji--this isn’t like our father, you don’t have to protect--”

“I don’t _know!”_ and Hanzo stops, hands hovering over Genji’s frame. “Anjia, please.”

He nods. Mechanical. “Okay,” he says, and tips Genji into his arms. “Okay. It doesn’t matter. You’re here now.”

Of course it matters--nothing has ever mattered more, not the clan, not their empire, not all the trees in Hanamura and beyond--but here is Genji, warm and shaking and asking him _please_ and he has never, ever been able to say no.

 _And what about next time_ , _then_ , he thinks. _Are you going to hold him then, too? Is he going to be conscious? Is he going to be breathing? How are you going to live with yourself, then?_

“Brother,” he whispers, and presses a shaking kiss into the ruined, tender scalp. “You cannot fight him anymore.”

And Genji jerks back all at once, pushes out more space between them as he sits back on his heels and looks at Hanzo as if he’s betrayed the both of them.

“You think this is going to stop me?” he snaps.

“Genji,” Hanzo warns, low and dark. “He’s going to--”

“--to kill me,” Genji says, and he stands on shaking legs, braces himself against the posts of Hanzo’s bed. “I know. Let him. If that’s what it takes.”

“ _Genji_ ,” Hanzo says, one more time, the closest he ever comes to praying.

Genji shakes his head. “Let him,” he says, and he spits through ruined lips and bloodied teeth,. “He can’t have me.”

Genji’s blood, just beneath the skin, burns a fiery, ancient green.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on [twitter](https://twitter.com/besselfcn) and [tumblr](https://besselfcn.tumblr.com/), please yell with me. Thank u.


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